


Fresh White Paint

by hedda62



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 14:33:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She's not code-named Control only because she gives the orders.</i> Episode tag: 4.12 "Control-Alt-Delete."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fresh White Paint

She’s long been aware of the irony. Seen from a particular angle, there’s a tragicomic disconnect between the doting single mother, guiding her daughter on a path toward a peaceful future, and the hardass spy-administrator who glories in taking personal responsibility for the deaths of terrorists. It’s an angle to which she chooses to be blind; she’s not code-named Control only because she gives the orders. Traitorous thoughts are locked down with a grip as firm as her agents’ trigger fingers. She never tells Julia to “go.” She never mentions green lights.

Julia is many things to her, and one. She is the result of an ill-advised night with a young French agent (ignorant of his fatherhood not only because of his operational decease three months later). She is never regretted; she is a treasure. She is the force that keeps Control human, that reminds her she has a name and a history and ancestors, that all this did not die with her own mother. Julia is young America personified. She is protected. And she is loved.

Control keeps her daughter’s photograph on her desk. Julia is six in the photo, posed awkwardly with her uncle’s hand on her shoulder and her aunt displaying a smile of perfect white teeth. No one is told she’s more than a beloved niece, though Control does little to hide the near-daily school drop-offs, the irregular attendance at soccer games, the hiring of a security-cleared nanny.

Travers slithers his way into her office one day, picks up the photo, and says, “What a lovely daughter you have.” They both hear the unspoken _too bad if something happened to her_. Control can’t help laughing at the banality of the threat, and he backs away, startled. She can forgive Samaritan’s operatives their arrogant menace, but not their complete lack of humor; she makes sure to trade obscene puns with Shiffman later while they take down a terror cell in Baton Rouge.

Northern Lights wasn’t exactly a laughfest either, but she often marvels at the quirky illogic of Harold Finch’s Machine as it putters away at its spare-time hobby. Not that she fails to take its assets seriously. Sameen Shaw and John Reese are trained to be dangerous, Finch is scarily clever, and Samantha Groves is the sort of stealth bomb that makes agents peer nervously into the shifting shadows and jump at pin-drops. She can be uncanny, chilling; when she mirrors the line that Travers flubbed, Control actually believes for a second that Julia might be in danger, and at the same time is vaguely disappointed. But the hackneyed phrase doesn’t follow; instead Root twists the blade in the wound. _We don’t kill children. We shake the bedrock of their worlds, tear them up by the…_ Terror and wordplay dance together; she can see Julia, transplanted. Safely, of course. There would be tears, but she’d learn to do without her mother. It’s one of many necessary contingencies, because even after landing behind a desk, Control’s survival has always been unsure. Nothing is certain but the rightness of her calling; nothing is guaranteed except that the job goes on.

Root knows this, of course; all she can do is hurt and threaten and fail. Desperation is death to mission success, and despite her cool bluster, she’s desperate. In fact, she’s aflame with anger and guilt. Reese, more practiced at self-restraint, is simmering. Finch is the only one who daunts Control; he speaks of Shaw in the past tense, and at first she thinks he’s given up, but it’s merely that his thermostat is set as low as hers. And ice burns just as well as heat. Root would have set her heart on fire, recklessly efficient, quick and stupid. Finch, she can’t help thinking, will leave her here in the dark and cold until her sins creep up like rats to chew away her bonds and her bones and her skin. And then make her clean up the mess.

It’s silly, because she has her escape at hand all along, and she’s only slightly unnerved when that’s part of Finch’s plan; she appreciates mastermind gestures, and she knows Samaritan is well-protected. She goes back to work reinvigorated from the encounter. If she’s a janitor, she will be the best one possible; she flies to Canada and tidies her mistake without a qualm. Said looks like the kids in IT, like the older brother of one of Julia’s classmates, like the man behind the counter at the neighborhood mom-and-pop. He also looks like a terrorist. Perhaps she has been lied to— _I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken_ —but it makes no difference to finishing the job.

It’s a long way home from Canada, and then she turns around and heads to New York, missing two days of driving Julia to school. Her mind is still full of fresh white paint as they creep through the traffic the next morning, the car’s heater blowing away the winter chill.

“Did you do your homework?” she asks; there’d been no chance the night before.

A pause, then: “Not quite all the math.” She lets the silence ask the question: standard interrogation technique. “If I have all the numbers from one to fifty in a basket what’s the probability of choosing a number not odd or prime,” Julia recites. “I don’t like probability!”

“Yeah, none of us do, kid.” Chances are that Travers will be waiting in her office, threat level set at unctuous. She hadn’t kept to the shadows on her way to the Stock Exchange; there hadn’t seemed any point. Chances are that Sameen Shaw is dead, judging by the number of repaired bullet holes just traceable to sensitive fingers. But then she’s risen from the grave before, when Control was actually trying to put her there.

She wishes she could tell Travers to go to hell, and take responsibility for the anguish in Root’s eyes. But she’s washed her fingers thoroughly, and it shouldn’t be for nothing. _Better a mother who kills people than no mother at all._

They stop, three cars back, at a traffic signal. “Let me see,” she says, and Julia hands the paper over from the back seat. The back of the sheet is covered with numbers. They mean nothing, and she doesn’t have time.

“Eight hundred and fifty-five,” she says, and puts her foot on the gas. The light is green.

**Author's Note:**

> The bowels of Christ quote is by Oliver Cromwell.


End file.
